Visiting Kauai’s North Shore, with its embarrassment of nature and cinematic coastlines, might convince you to forget about heading back to the mainland. And no one understands that more than the people who live there.

The drive from Princeville down to Hanalei, on the North Shore of Kauai, is one of the better ways on this planet to spend ten minutes. Just past a sleepy one-engine fire station, Kuhio Highway—the island’s only thoroughfare, which snakes along its rounded coast—veers left and descends down a bluff from Princeville’s manicured condo developments into a lush agricultural valley of bright-­emerald taro fields set against mountains so deeply, hauntingly green they’re practically blue. (It’s no wonder Kauai stood in for Vietnam in 2008’s Tropic Thunder.) At the base of the hill, amid skinny palm trees, you’ll find a one-lane steel-trussed bridge originally built in 1912. Cross it in the early evening, as the sun drops behind shadowy, cloud-capped peaks, and the mountains texturize, separating into lush layers of dense overgrowth, a verdant orgy of jades, limes, and chartreuse aglow in Hawaii’s famously soft light.

Something magical happens on this drive. At the very least, you look up from your iPhone, and everyone in the car falls silent. People say they are “called” to Kauai—here’s where that begins to sound less Bible-thumpy. My father-in-law discovered it in 1982, when a long layover in Honolulu prompted him to ask an airline employee what other island he should visit. At the airport in Lihue, on Kauai’s South Shore, he rented a car and started driving. A year later, he’d bought a condo in Prince­ville, the North Shore’s most developed area, where there’s a St. Regis and an 18-hole golf course—but no stoplights. For the next two decades, he would fly his three children to Kauai from Washington, D.C., for the summer. My husband and I still come every other year, if we’re lucky, staying in the house his parents purchased from novelist Haruki Murakami. Each time we drive to Hanalei—usually to grab burritos at Pat’s Taqueria, a reliably delicious taco truck, before hitting one of the near-empty beaches outside town—we revive a long-running fantasy of ours. It’s the one where we pack up our belongings and ditch our hamster-wheel life in New York for a more contemplative existence out here on the most remote of the major Hawaiian islands, just a stone’s throw from the date line, at the last stop before tomorrow. The details inevitably bring us back to earth, but the drive has lost none of its power.

Jim Moffat, a celebrated chef from San Francisco, actually did pull the escape hatch. “I came here on a whim and instantly fell in love with it,” he recalls, grabbing a cold-brewed Maui-grown coffee at the counter of his new artisanal bakery in Hanalei. “I asked my girl if she wanted to raise kids on the beach, and she said yes.” The couple moved here in 2004; he opened Bar Acuda, a perpetually packed tapas restaurant, in 2005; earned a James Beard nod in 2012; and, last year, took over the town’s underwhelming coffee shop and replaced it with the Hanalei Bread Company, which sells insanely delicious $8 chai spice and coconut java drinks alongside homemade millet sandwich bread. Take a seat on the bakery’s wraparound porch for some fantastic people-­watching—this is the de facto town square, where tattooed surfers, attractive young tourist couples, oddly healthy wild chickens, and, depending on the day, Pierce Brosnan (who has a house here) all pass by.

Other than Moffat’s establishments, a new influx of food trucks, and a slight increase in rush-hour traffic, Hanalei has changed little in recent years. There are still no national chain stores, or buildings taller than a coconut tree (this is an actual law on Kauai), and no man who lives here seems to wear a shirt, ever. As night falls, the ring of exquisite beaches framing Hanalei Bay
fades to near-black, lit not by high-rises but by the porch lights of a few bungalows on stilts set back in the trees, which appear unassuming but fetch millions. “Sometimes it’s like living on an island in the middle of the ocean!” snorts Moffat with a shrug when an employee finds him on the porch to inform him that his restaurant and bakery have both lost power.

Delicious though his food may be, Moffat knows that no one comes to the North Shore of Kauai for a meal. There’s no better way to describe what one does here than the well-worn phrase, "commune with nature." “It’s a heavy place,” says author and former pro volleyball player Gabby Reece, who spends half the year on Kauai with her husband, big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton, and hosts free morning workouts when she’s in town. “There’s not a lot of white noise or distraction, so you kind of have to deal with yourself.” This is a place where the surf is big, the rain plentiful, and the hiking legendary—many trails end at waterfalls or pristine beaches, like Hanakapi‘ai, the hidden slip of sand two miles into the Na Pali Coast’s famous Kalalau Trail. The North Shore is the last word in beaches, really—a mic drop of sand-meets-sea around every bend in the road—and has been immortalized in films from South Pacific (1958) to The Descendants (2011), making the island an open secret in Hollywood. (Ben Stiller and Bette Midler own homes here, and Mark Zuckerberg recently bought about 700 acres near Kilauea, a former sugar plantation.)

While big-name resorts have proliferated on the sunnier South Shore, the North has retained a sort of outlaw anti-glamour, resisting so much as a boutique hotel. Residents have successfully blocked state plans to expand and elevate the bridge into Hanalei, which floods when it rains and bottlenecks traffic at other times, because the plans would have eased the way for tour buses and construction vehicles. As a result, Hanalei, especially, often feels like some secret Hawaii, a last bastion of undiscovered authenticity where it’s still possible to live like a local. Here you can watch Hamilton, who grew up on Kauai, catch perfectly peeling waves at the point break a few hundred yards out from the St. Regis. Or rent a board from the Hanalei Surf Company and ride some yourself at Pine Trees, the narrow beach on Hanalei Bay where local legends Andy and Bruce Irons learned to surf. Back in Princeville, you can walk down an unassuming path and find yourself swimming at Queen’s Bath, a gleaming tidal pool carved by lava, amid fish crashed in by the waves, or waiting for a sea turtle to swim by before jumping off low cliffs into the ocean. (Don’t even consider doing this unless it’s summer and the surf is calm; plenty of people have been swept out to sea.) Later, you’ll want to blow off your dinner reservation and pick up fresh ono at the fish market behind the kitschy Dolphin Restaurant, then make a picnic of it on the beach. Kauai rewards the casual and spontaneous. “So many of the best experiences here are about getting lost,” says Aaron Moeller, 35, a Kauai-raised organic farmer and founder of Naikela Botanicals, a line of locally grown herbal teas and health powders. “Instead of having a destination, just put the wind in your hair. Check the waves at different spots, see what’s happening today.”

Photo by Adrian Gaut

The Moeller family of Naikela Botanicals, part of Kauai’s growing sustainable farming movement.

To understand how the North Shore has retained its end-of-the-earth vibe, never succumbing to a Tulum-like fate, you have to know its past. As people who live here like to tell you, Kauai is the only Hawaiian island that has never been conquered, separated from the others by a wide, ornery channel that thwarted King Kamehameha I, who united the other islands by force in the early nineteenth century. (Kauai joined the kingdom by treaty in 1810.) Its geographic remoteness has cultivated a sense of separateness, with ancient inhabitants speaking a distinct dialect of Hawaiian. This history informs locals’ identity. “Kauai is kind of the last bastion of fighters,” says Sheila Donnelly Theroux, a luxury publicist on Oahu (and wife of writer Paul Theroux), whose family has lived in Hawaii for four generations and who calls Kauai her favorite island. “The people who live in Hanalei are the reason it’s so retro. I can’t think of another place in Hawaii that’s so preserved in time.”

There were also the hurricanes. Iwa crashed through in 1982, and, a decade later, Iniki, a Category 4, devastated Kauai. The storm, etched in the minds of locals, took years to rebuild from. “We haven’t changed as quickly as we might have if we’d had a vibrant economy for the last 30 years,” says Jan TenBruggencate, a local communications consultant and newspaper reporter. Because Kauai lacks Maui and Oahu’s tourist infrastructure, it occasionally creaks under the weight of the modest crowds that come to admire it. Ke‘e Beach, at the trailhead leading to the Na Pali Coast, has suffered for its famed beauty, with cars clogging the parking lots at the end of the road. It’s one of the few genuinely crowded places on the island, which is why locals tend to avoid it in favor of beaches like Lumahai, where you can pull a car right up to the sand near a stand of ironwood pines. This is where I meet Koral McCarthy, a tanned, blue-eyed thirty-something swimming with her four-year-old daughter in the cold, clear river at the beach’s western edge (the ocean here is too rough for swimming). McCarthy grew up a surfer girl in Wainiha, a slip of a town just past Hanalei with a large population of native Hawaiians, one of whom is her husband. She recently opened the Ohana Shop, a stylish anti-­souvenir boutique that preserves traditional Hawaiian craftsmanship by selling design-minded objects like hand-carved bowls and miniature surfboards made by one of Kauai’s top board shapers, Bobby Allen. She represents a growing class of young North Shore entrepreneurs who believe Kauai is special, almost mystical, and that its culture and tight community can be preserved with conscious small business. “There’s always going to be progress,” she says. “But this island has a way of taking care of herself. I don’t think she’ll ever be overrun by anything.”

The North has retained a sort of outlaw anti-glamour, resisting so much as a boutique hotel.

Moeller is also a young business owner who’s interested in redefining what it means to make a living here. Today, he’s walking us through his “garden,” a wild, unkempt expanse of herbs and flowers with exotic names like Thai Red Roselle, Panama berry, and Mexican mint marigold, all of which are twice the size of any herbs you’d find at a Whole Foods. “You’ve never tasted fresh stevia before?” he asks me, tearing off a bright-green leaf. The island still imports roughly 85 percent of its food, but Moeller and other young organic farmers are working to change that, stocking restaurant kitchens across the island with local fruit, vegetables, and meat. He got his real start on the Big Island, at a sustainable operation owned by a tech billionaire, before returning home to Kauai with his wife and young daughters. Here, he connected with Eric and Lyn Taylor, philanthropists from South Africa who had bought 130 acres of undeveloped land on which they planned to run camps for disadvantaged youth. Moeller now farms his massive herbs on two lush, rolling acres that look like paradise—or at least Jurassic Park, parts of which were filmed on land owned by the Taylors’ neighbors. “Kauai has the most idyllic growing conditions in the world,” Moeller says. That’s apparent at Hanalei’s Saturday farmers’ market, which is rapturously attended by almost everyone on the North Shore and overflows with locally grown chard, bananas, juicy papayas, cacao, and coconuts with straws in them.

But few communal events are as pleasurable as drinking ginger margaritas around sunset at the St. Regis in Princeville. The hotel’s grand marble floors and dark wood paneling are delightfully out of step with the food trucks and barefoot culture of this place, and its bar terrace overlooks the east side of Hanalei Bay, giving everyone here—tourists and locals alike—a straight shot of the mountains and the electric-tangerine sun descending over the water. Tonight, Lyndie Irons, widow of pro surfer Andy (who passed away several years ago at age 32), her brother-in-law, Bruce Irons, and their respective children are at a table on the porch, glamorous surf royalty holding court up here in the sky as a smattering of locals paddle out to the break to catch the day’s last waves down below. “It never gets old,” Lyndie Irons had told me earlier in the week. “The beauty here, we never take it for granted—and I’ve traveled the world.”

Don’t Hike it Alone
“Travelers don’t realize how wild our landscape is,” says Sue Kanoho of the Kauai Visitors Bureau. “They shouldn’t navigate on their own.” Guides from Outfitters Kauai can tell you where and how to explore safely.